E. J. Graff studied at Ohio University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She also attended Warren Wilson College and in 1986 received a Master of Fine Arts degree. Graff started her career as a writer in 1980s when she wrote for and edited small feminist and gay newspapers like Bay Windows, Gay Community News. Later her works about lesbian, gay, and bisexual issues appeared in such outlets as the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Out, and The American Prospect. She also worked as a visiting scholar at Radcliffe College from 1997 to 1998 and as an affiliated scholar from 1998 to 1999. In 2005 she took up a post of an associate director at Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and held this post until 2011. Since 2001, she has been a resident scholar at Brandeis University's Women’s Studies Research Center.
Graff started to write books in the 1990s. She wrote the first full-length American book on same-sex marriage, What Is Marriage For?, in 1999. Over the last fifteen years, Graff has expanded her reporting and analysis to cover gender and sexuality more broadly, including discrimination and violence against women, children, and people of color, employment law, fraud and corruption in international adoption. Graff collaborated with Evelyn F. Murphy, president of the Women Are Getting Even Project, to write Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid like Men—And What To Do about It.
In 1996, Graff received the Margolis Award for political essay and journalism. She also received Massachusetts Artists Foundation, Watertown Cultural Council Award for Fiction and Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for Fiction. In 2001, she received The Nation Institute Investigative Fund Research Award.
